Monday, April 25, 2005

Our last day in the house for 100 days,

maybe more, maybe less, maybe a lot less, though I refuse to believe that could happen.Not that I am not a practical person and haven’t already considered how much could happen in just under 15 weeks, a revolution even cutting Peter and I off from our children and grandchildren.With our current government, anything is possible.Okay, so a temporary blip is possible, a heart attack on the part of either of us, a broken arm, a broken leg, hit by a tracker trailer, a stolen bike.My mother is elderly and not in the best of health, what if one of the kids is in an accident, someone kidnaps one of the grandchildren, the house burns to the ground and yes, we will make the necessary airline reservations, calculate time away from the trip or walk away from it all together, leave the bikes and equipment, or ship them, and come home for good.But nothing is going to go wrong, I am sure of it. I don't feel like Dorothy, I am not in Kansas (I am in Virginia, actually), and I do need a pair of red slippers to click together and repeat "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Last night, after the family cook-out that was more a go! go! get the hell out of here, already! than have a great trip Mom and Peter, I went through four more boxes of stuff.Today, on the way out of Newtown, we dropped another two packages and approximately 40 pieces of mail at the Hawleyville Post Office bringing our total postal items output to probably 400 pieces of mail over the past month.Peter says he thinks it is around 500, I think it was around 300, so I settle on 400.It was a lot.

Between last night and leaving the house at 4:19 p.m. today, there was recycling to do, legal papers to fax to Little Rock, Arkansas, four panniers to pack, two handlebar bags to pack, two trunk packs to pack (that is the cute square one that fit over the fender in the back of the bike), two day-packs to pack, there were showers, inventories to take, decisions about what to pack, yup, even decisions about what to pack, there were two meals, laundry, multiple phone conversations with Technical Support at Cingular ® , or what they pass off as technical support.I call it a lack of technical support!, perhaps even a lack of customer support!You can be sure, Peter and I will be leaving Cingular® when we return from this trip, if not sooner!

When we got up this morning, there were still twenty or so items on the various “do-by-Monday” lists. Chris and I watered plants, documented the type of plant, frequency of waterings, do they like to stay moist or get dry between waterings, I put the remaining boxes of untouched paper, unopened mail, and stuff safely away and out of sight until we return, Chris and I handled another half of a box of paper, created more mail to drop at the post office on the way out of town, Peter and I took photos for the web site, said goodbye to two of my children, loaded remaining software on my p.c., set up Peter’s email on my p.c., moved Peter’s p.c. upstairs to my office and loaded a printer driver off the Internet so Chris can use the p.c. while Peter and I are away and be able print to my printer, an hp Deskjet 5150 (and that last one ended up taking about 45 minutes to do , instead of the expected ten minutes). We are in our second of THREE days of battling with Cingular to get the wireless service working, which is taking hours of our time today. We handled emails, phone calls, put away three baskets of folded clothes, cleaned dishes, put dishes away, repaired a broken ceramic frog that I knocked off one of the plant pots while I was tending to the plants for the last time, at least until August for those that survive.

Last night, Peter took about fifteen bags of garbage, some paper only, to the bottom of the driveway for the weekly pickup.Then, there were the remaining things on the kitchen table to go through, the things on the dining room table, loading the car, and loading the car, and loading the car.We did manage to get about six hours of sleep last night.Even knowing it was our last night in that bed for the next 15 weeks, there was nothing dramatic about it, we were tired, we still had a lot to do, we needed a bit of sleep, just another night, no last meal sort of thing, some hysteria on my part, but I fell asleep in due course and Peter is nearly always snoring within minutes.Last night was no exception.

As we left the house today, it was raining lightly, and did so on and off for the next hour.The day has been crisp, a bit chilly, and threatening rain from the first.I don’t believe we are actually going, and I believe it too much.I can’t imagine the first time we hit Key West, and yet I am already there, already been there and been home , time circling in on itself, and all of this is just me on rewind so I can pay attention to the details this time around, so I can remember.

I don’t take one last look at the house, as I thought I would.I don’t take one last look at the neighborhood, it’s the same as it always is.People go about their business, their errands, they commute to school, to work, to the post office.Peter is driving as he usually does when we are together in the same car.I am usually doing some busy work, reading or editing or paperwork of some sort.This time, I look around trying to catch a world changing before my eyes, but it goes on as it does, nothing notable about the day, this moment, this place, it’s just a street, a town, a day in April, it’s just an etherial bridge between what is now moving away behind us and what lies ahead, but I don’t feel the bridge materialize as we move forward, I cannot see it taking shape, and I don’t know where it ends exactly, nor does it seem to matter, the ending that is.In the words of Helen Keller, life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.I don’t feel the daring adventure of it yet, but I suspect it will settle in eventually.Or perhaps this is just another bike ride.We have done lots of bike rides and this is just another bike ride, or another lot of bike rides strung together.

Eventually, I find nothing interesting about trying to be in the moment.By the end of the day, we will go 378.4 miles and pull into a hotel in

Fredericksburg

,

VA

just past

midnight

.Two hotels in a row will be full on a Monday night, go figure.The hotel we stay at provides a bed, a shower, a TV, and place to drop all of our stuff.We have what we need though it will cost us a stunning $121.08, $20 of that will be for the dial-up phone call I make to post stuff because my outrageously expensive Cingular® wireless service ($75 a month) still isn’t working (and when it does start working, I will discover it doesn't work very well).I read their tag line, “raising the bar,” a hundred times over the two days of working with them and I am not amused. I will see their billboards as I drive south, and I will be even more not amused.

I use the bed, pass on the shower, though Peter takes one, and we never turn on the TV which is unusual for Peter who typically hits that power button before the hotel door slams shut.I am feeling that slump a mother feels after birth, after waiting nine months, I have been waiting four; that let down after the pushing and grunting for twenty hours (which it was for me for two of my children, twenty hours plus), and we have been pushing and grunting for days, weeks, wanting to deliver this project, hear it take its first real breath of air, this air, this out-of-the-womb (out of the house) fill your lungs and cry air, though I am too exhausted to cry.Where’s that bridge, where’s the view from on top, the panorama, the horizon I am walking towards, where is the awe for the world I have set myself the task of discovering.I know, intellectually, it isn’t somewhere out there and I know, intellectually, it is everywhere out there.Some theorize that the world and everything in it is nothing more than an interpretation, a sort of mirage, that it has no existance except in our naming it, sort of like the movie "The Matrix."

maybe more, maybe less, maybe a lot less, though I refuse to believe that could happen.Not that I am not a practical person and haven’t already considered how much could happen in just under 15 weeks, a revolution even cutting Peter and I off from our children and grandchildren.With our current government, anything is possible.Okay, so a temporary blip is possible, a heart attack on the part of either of us, a broken arm, a broken leg, hit by a tracker trailer, a stolen bike.My mother is elderly and not in the best of health, what if one of the kids is in an accident, someone kidnaps one of the grandchildren, the house burns to the ground and yes, we will make the necessary airline reservations, calculate time away from the trip or walk away from it all together, leave the bikes and equipment, or ship them, and come home for good.But nothing is going to go wrong, I am sure of it. I don't feel like Dorothy, I am not in Kansas (I am in Virginia, actually), and I do need a pair of red slippers to click together and repeat "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Last night, after the family cook-out that was more a go! go! get the hell out of here, already! than have a great trip Mom and Peter, I went through four more boxes of stuff.Today, on the way out of Newtown, we dropped another two packages and approximately 40 pieces of mail at the Hawleyville Post Office bringing our total postal items output to probably 400 pieces of mail over the past month.Peter says he thinks it is around 500, I think it was around 300, so I settle on 400.It was a lot.

Between last night and leaving the house at 4:19 p.m. today, there was recycling to do, legal papers to fax to Little Rock, Arkansas, four panniers to pack, two handlebar bags to pack, two trunk packs to pack (that is the cute square one that fit over the fender in the back of the bike), two day-packs to pack, there were showers, inventories to take, decisions about what to pack, yup, even decisions about what to pack, there were two meals, laundry, multiple phone conversations with Technical Support at Cingular ® , or what they pass off as technical support.I call it a lack of technical support!, perhaps even a lack of customer support!You can be sure, Peter and I will be leaving Cingular® when we return from this trip, if not sooner!

When we got up this morning, there were still twenty or so items on the various “do-by-Monday” lists. Chris and I watered plants, documented the type of plant, frequency of waterings, do they like to stay moist or get dry between waterings, I put the remaining boxes of untouched paper, unopened mail, and stuff safely away and out of sight until we return, Chris and I handled another half of a box of paper, created more mail to drop at the post office on the way out of town, Peter and I took photos for the web site, said goodbye to two of my children, loaded remaining software on my p.c., set up Peter’s email on my p.c., moved Peter’s p.c. upstairs to my office and loaded a printer driver off the Internet so Chris can use the p.c. while Peter and I are away and be able print to my printer, an hp Deskjet 5150 (and that last one ended up taking about 45 minutes to do , instead of the expected ten minutes). We are in our second of THREE days of battling with Cingular to get the wireless service working, which is taking hours of our time today. We handled emails, phone calls, put away three baskets of folded clothes, cleaned dishes, put dishes away, repaired a broken ceramic frog that I knocked off one of the plant pots while I was tending to the plants for the last time, at least until August for those that survive.

Last night, Peter took about fifteen bags of garbage, some paper only, to the bottom of the driveway for the weekly pickup.Then, there were the remaining things on the kitchen table to go through, the things on the dining room table, loading the car, and loading the car, and loading the car.We did manage to get about six hours of sleep last night.Even knowing it was our last night in that bed for the next 15 weeks, there was nothing dramatic about it, we were tired, we still had a lot to do, we needed a bit of sleep, just another night, no last meal sort of thing, some hysteria on my part, but I fell asleep in due course and Peter is nearly always snoring within minutes.Last night was no exception.

As we left the house today, it was raining lightly, and did so on and off for the next hour.The day has been crisp, a bit chilly, and threatening rain from the first.I don’t believe we are actually going, and I believe it too much.I can’t imagine the first time we hit Key West, and yet I am already there, already been there and been home , time circling in on itself, and all of this is just me on rewind so I can pay attention to the details this time around, so I can remember.

I don’t take one last look at the house, as I thought I would.I don’t take one last look at the neighborhood, it’s the same as it always is.People go about their business, their errands, they commute to school, to work, to the post office.Peter is driving as he usually does when we are together in the same car.I am usually doing some busy work, reading or editing or paperwork of some sort.This time, I look around trying to catch a world changing before my eyes, but it goes on as it does, nothing notable about the day, this moment, this place, it’s just a street, a town, a day in April, it’s just an etherial bridge between what is now moving away behind us and what lies ahead, but I don’t feel the bridge materialize as we move forward, I cannot see it taking shape, and I don’t know where it ends exactly, nor does it seem to matter, the ending that is.In the words of Helen Keller, life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.I don’t feel the daring adventure of it yet, but I suspect it will settle in eventually.Or perhaps this is just another bike ride.We have done lots of bike rides and this is just another bike ride, or another lot of bike rides strung together.

Eventually, I find nothing interesting about trying to be in the moment.By the end of the day, we will go 378.4 miles and pull into a hotel in

Fredericksburg

,

VA

just past

midnight

.Two hotels in a row will be full on a Monday night, go figure.The hotel we stay at provides a bed, a shower, a TV, and place to drop all of our stuff.We have what we need though it will cost us a stunning $121.08, $20 of that will be for the dial-up phone call I make to post stuff because my outrageously expensive Cingular® wireless service ($75 a month) still isn’t working (and when it does start working, I will discover it doesn't work very well).I read their tag line, “raising the bar,” a hundred times over the two days of working with them and I am not amused. I will see their billboards as I drive south, and I will be even more not amused.

I use the bed, pass on the shower, though Peter takes one, and we never turn on the TV which is unusual for Peter who typically hits that power button before the hotel door slams shut.I am feeling that slump a mother feels after birth, after waiting nine months, I have been waiting four; that let down after the pushing and grunting for twenty hours (which it was for me for two of my children, twenty hours plus), and we have been pushing and grunting for days, weeks, wanting to deliver this project, hear it take its first real breath of air, this air, this out-of-the-womb (out of the house) fill your lungs and cry air, though I am too exhausted to cry.Where’s that bridge, where’s the view from on top, the panorama, the horizon I am walking towards, where is the awe for the world I have set myself the task of discovering.I know, intellectually, it isn’t somewhere out there and I know, intellectually, it is everywhere out there.Some theorize that the world and everything in it is nothing more than an interpretation, a sort of mirage, that it has no existance except in our naming it, sort of like in the movie "The Matrix."

Chuang Tzu,the most significant of China's early interpreters of Taoism, 389-286 BC, mused "I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?" I will gladly be either.

See you on the road .....

"I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"

"I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?"

Comments

Glad to hear you got off safely. Did you know that it snowed briefly yesterday (Monday)? I was driving on I84 heading home from Danbury about 11:30am and was just past Exit 8 when all the sudden it was snowing! Melted on contact, but was very strange and only in that one place.